Online Words Archives - Page 12 of 15

CHOOSING CREATIVE SERVICE PROVIDERS, STEP 3: REALLY A BUSINESS?

May 29, 2013 by Scott Flood

This is another in a seven-post series on how to choose the right creative service provider (writer, designer, photographer, etc.) for your business or organization. This advice is based on what I’ve seen companies do the wrong way over the years. Hope you enjoy and find it useful!

A prospective creative services provider may not need an office address in an expensive downtown tower, but he or she should still follow practices that demonstrate they take their business – and yours – very seriously.

MATCH THE TONE TO THE OCCASION

March 6, 2013 by Scott Flood

I was giving a talk to a business group a few weeks back, and after I stressed the importance of keeping marketing communications conversational, one of the attendees posed a question about how much of conversational tone is enough. It was a great question.

I responded that the answer depends upon the message-sender, the recipient, the medium, and the environment. For example, if you’re responding on social media to a longtime customer, you can be far more conversational and fun than you’d want to be in an initial message to a conservative prospect.

TODAY, I WRITE FOR SCANNERS

February 13, 2013 by Scott Flood

Many things have changed in the three decades since I started putting words to paper to earn a living. For one thing, I rarely put words to paper anymore. Sadly, nobody has created an equivalent saying that involves phosphors or pixels. But that’s not the point …

What is the point is that many of those changes have affected the way I write. One of the biggest changes is the result of two factors: an oversupply of information and a paucity of time. Thanks largely to the internet, we face an overwhelming amount of information, and our busier lives mean we have less time to sift through all of it.

WHY AM I SUCH A FUSSBUDGET?

February 6, 2013 by Scott Flood

Ah, there’s a wonderful old word one rarely hears these days. “Fussbudget” dates back to the turn of the century (the previous turn, not the most recent one) and refers to one who gets worked up about small matters that seem to have little importance. Many people would toss matters about grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage into that category, and would brush aside my concerns as annoying at best, “anal” at worst. (And an aside — how many people who bandy “anal” about as a criticism actually grasp the underlying Freudian concept? But I guess that would be fussbudgety of me.)

Those who know me well know that I’m rarely serious. Why then do I have such a concern about the written word and the finer points associated with its use?

GRAMMAR IS WITHOUT RULES

January 30, 2013 by Scott Flood

Did that headline stop you? Of course grammar is full of rules, isn’t it? Your seventh-grade English teacher tried her best to drum all those rules into your head. You remember all that red ink on your brilliant essays.

Hate to burst your bubble, but there is no set of definitive grammar rules. When Moses lugged those tablets back down the mountain, he didn’t carry a copy of the Chicago Manual or the AP Stylebook with him. I wish that had been the case, because it would have been a lot easier on those of us who write for a living.

ARE THEY DEFIANT? DEFINITELY!

January 16, 2013 by Scott Flood

One of the most commonly misspelled words these days — particularly in the social media universe — is definite and its related forms.

Folks who mean to tell you that their agreement is definite will instead write that they are defiant. To demonstrate their agreement with the political stance you’ve expressed in your post, they’ll comment “Defiantly!” And since their trust spellchecker won’t tell them otherwise, they’ll assume they’re correct.

CONTRACT LANGUAGE DETRACTS

December 19, 2012 by Scott Flood

One of the ways many people try to make their business writing sound more impressive is to try to make it a bit lawyerly. The legal community has long had a unique style and syntax that’s meant to create clarity, but that is often far more effective at obfuscating the meaning. I suspect it may be an attempt to ensure the ongoing demand for the profession, because one generally needs to hire an attorney to understand something another attorney has written.

But I’m not here to offend attorneys (nor to incur their wrath). I’m here to help companies and other organizations communicate more clearly, and one way they can do that is to stop trying to write like attorneys.

YOU WANT A BETTER WORD?

December 5, 2012 by Scott Flood

When FDR spoke about freedom from want in his 1941 State of the Union address, he was talking about the concept, not the word itself. However, I’ve noticed that many people — particularly in the business world — have a very real aversion to “want” and an apparent need to be free from it.

I’m not sure why people are afraid of such a simple word. My only guess is that they’re focused on its more negative contexts, or that they find it too simple and folksy to serve intelligent readers. In most cases, though, it’s the ideal verb for the situation.

CAPITALIZATION DOESN’T MAKE THINGS MORE IMPORTANT

November 28, 2012 by Scott Flood

There’s an interesting quirk that shows up when many companies or organizations develop content of all types. They capitalize words that have no business being capitalized. Or, to put it differently, They capitalize Words that don’t really need to have Capital letters.

I suspect the reason they do that is that they think the use of capital letters make the words seem more Important or Impressive.